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Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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June 23, 2005

A Day at the Lake

Windowsill sculptures: a glass insulator, some choice feathers stuck in an old padlock, a brass boat fitting, and an unidentified jawbone found in the woods.

I've spent the last few days at my parents' home on the small lake in central New York State where I grew up, and as the sun sets over the maple and ash trees in the woods across the road, accompanied on its journey to the horizon by the song of a wood thrush, I'm feeling like I should write a long post, illustrated with photographs, under the title of "Where I Came From and Why I Am the Way that I Am." Of course, the first 18 years of anyone's life are only part of the story, but this particular visit, as June turns into full summer, has brought back so many memories. Sitting here tonight, I can still feel some of the sun's heat on my face and the slightly-water-filled ear canals from an afternoon spent in the lake swimming and splashing with a dear friend's child - something I haven't done for years and years. My cousin, B., sat on the bank with J. and my old friend (he and I saw each other today for the first time since 1970) while I swam and batted a beach ball across the water, helping this very good-natured and precocious seven-year-old have fun in a silty lake instead of a city pool.

At one point, waiting for her to chase the shiny purple ball, I treaded water in the place where our old dock used to be, and talked to my cousin on the shore. "Do you dream about this place, about being on the dock when we were kids?" I asked her.

"Of course!" she said, matter-of-factly. J. has heard me recount so many dreams -realistic and fantastic - involving this lake; I was surprised by my own question and happy to hear B.'s answer. My cousin, who was almost like a sister, we played together so much, turned to him and added, "You have no idea how many hours we spent right here, in the water. All summer, basically!"

At least one, and usually several, of the adults would come down to keep an eye on us. B. asked me, "Remember how we used to come down and Grandma would be sitting in the rowboat, tied up to shore, reading a book, and we'd sneak up and push her out into the lake?" I nodded and laughed. The little girl looked back and forth between us, slightly astonished and delighted at the idea.

Earlier, her feet hurting from walking on the pebbly, rocky bottom, she had asked me, "Why would you want to swim in a lake when you could swim in a nice clean blue pool?"

"It's just different," I said. "In a lake you're free, and once you can swim pretty well, you don't have to stay inside the ropes..."

"...and bump into the walls," she finished.

"And you can see things," I said. Later I showed her the still-submerged concrete blocks B.and I used to use to stand on and jump off when we were little and our swimming was confined to the shallow sandbar to the left of the dock. I expected her to complain about how slimy they were from the silt and algae, but by that time she was too interested in getting up on them herself.

You can't convert a pool kid to a lake kid in one afternoon, but between swimming and learning to row a boat and fishing (the activity ended when the bobber and hook lodged up in some tree branches - along with numerous others from my own earlier years) and weaving a raft out of tall rushes, I'd say she had a pretty good time, and a day she's likely to remember. Me too.

Comments

Some of my best memories of Boston were of my daily summer swims in Walden Pond. I'd go after work with my friends and we'd swim for hours, right into the evenings when nighthawks would wing over the water. When diving, the sunlight would spear into the green murk and perch would swim past our outstretched hands. I'd never realized that I could get so strong or that skinny dipping could be so much fun (people just don't go swimming in lakes here in Japan). When I met my girlfriend at the time one of the first things she did was challenge me to a swim in Walden in late March, when ice still rimmed the shores. It was my introduction to swimming in frigid waters, which physically changed my views of my relationship to the physical world and also made me a lot more vigorous. I've never been happier with my body since, and I miss the freedom that I found in lake swimming.

I always wanted to grow up on a lake - in fact, that was the road not travelled, in a sense, because we lived on a lakeshore property in central Maine until I was five. But then we moved to a mountaintop farm in PA and I grew up in the woods. And in point of fact what I long for most from that place in Maine was not the lake, which had scary leeches, but the long-abandoned top pasture full of bare rock and low, flat junipers - that Canadian Shield look. I love that.

You write, "I'm feeling like I should write a long post, illustrated with photographs, under the title of 'Where I Came From and Why I Am the Way that I Am.'" Isn't there a sense in which everything we write is a substitution for what we feel we *really* need to write? Or is that feeling just the inevitable byproduct of living with Protestant guilt? In any case, the results are often far better than we thought we could manage. (Probably a lesson there about grace, or something.)

Growing up closer to the coast, and going often in the summer, I'm still somewhat more of a sea-loving than lake-loving person. But the joys of natural setting are similar - the smell, the slime(!), the creatures in/on the rocks, the feel of sand/silt between the toes, the boundless water, the hours exploring. I do also have some fond memories of lakes - so much quieter and calmer than the ocean! - the stillness and sense of enclosure. Lakes give more of a sense of being in a private little world apart from the outside. The ocean opens up and is more daunting, too big to feel entirely safe.